One thing that preoccupies a lot of students is travel. Whether for spring break, visiting family over the holidays (which hopefully they pay for, right?), or just a quick get-away with friends, everyone needs a break from those long, torturous hours of study. Or maybe that’s just me. I need more breaks that include travel than the number I currently take (which is a whopping zero).

Most of us already know about Greyhound, Amtrak, Travelocity, Kayak, Hotwire and the like. But there’re a few other sites out there that warrant mention. For those who are comfortable with taking the bus, there’s Megabus. This only services a few areas of the country (and Canada), but their rates are cheap and the transportation is reliable (from what I hear; it’s not actually available where I live). For cheaper flights, consider sites like Travelzoo and StudentUniverse. Both of these sites seek out lower rates for students, including some amazing deals on international travel.

Of course, there’s always the beloved student road trip. It never hurts to see if someone you know wants to vacation with you, reducing fuel costs. To get a good estimate of how much money you’ll actually spend (and whether it’s a better deal to drive or fly) on gas, check out Trip Gas Price. They keep track of regional average fuel costs and allow you to enter a starting city and a destination city, plus the type of vehicle you drive. Then it’ll calculate not only the estimated distance, but the estimated fuel cost for the entire trip. Currently the site only uses major cities instead of accounting for rural localities, but it still provides a good gauge of how much you’ll spend for fuel on any given trip.

For the destination itself, most of the people I know seem to focus on large cities with lots of tourist activities. Personally, I shy away from these sorts of vacations because they’re so very expensive. Despite my love of cities like New York and San Francisco, hotels are expensive (even hostels are costly in some of these cities), the cost of getting there is high and activities themselves seem to require the donation of at least one extremity. Instead, I try to focus on smaller destinations, or sometimes I forgo a specific destination all together.

A fun vacation activity for a road trip is to make a list of odd historical sites within a couple states of where you live. You can easily visit them all on a road trip. Bring along a tent and a couple sleeping bags and you can also camp in lieu of hitting up hotels. For example, from Houston I could spend a couple weeks touring Old West sites of note and Civil War landmarks. The tip of Texas conducted the Civil War after it’d ended because it took so long for them to get the message the war was over (there’s also a state park there that allows camping for roughly $10/car). Tombstone isn’t too far away and is packed with a shockingly large number of things to do for such a small town (the Rose Museum, horse-drawn carriage tours of the history, live shows reenacting the fight of the OK Corral, natural landmarks and stunning deserts to poke around). There’s also the painted desert and lots of national and state forests to explore, not to mention road-side museums with a plethora of bizarre sites (entry fees never top $5). Heading north to Nebraska is the Boothill Cemetery, the home of Kool-Aid (okay, come on – who doesn’t want to see that?), incredible Native American landmarks, the Pioneer Trail and all sorts of other things. In the Dakotas and in California you can pan for gold and really see things about how people lived “way back when.” There’s so much all over the country to visit, I couldn’t begin to list it all. This nation has a fascinating history that’s waiting to be explored. All you need is a car and a few bucks in your pocket to pay for camp sites. Talk to locals and they’ll tell you about other oddities in their area you’d never know about otherwise (in this way, I learned about the strange case of David the Czech in Oklahoma, who had a drawn out court ordeal with some local Germans he accused of poisoning his cattle. His yard is now full of billboards he and his family have made detailing their outrage). Bring along a cooler and a camping stove (you can get one of these at a restaurant supply store for about $50; fuel canisters cost about $1.50 for about 4 hours of cook time), and you’re not relegated to fast food and diner cuisine, either. Whether alone or with friends, I always come back from these trips enriched and refreshed.

The biggest problem with student travel I see is that most of us focus more on the crazy times, such as Ft. Lauderdale or San Padre Island. If we expand our view to encompass less traveled roads, we can have an equally good time, learn something new, have less hangovers and spend a lot less money doing it all. For me, this is the best way to enjoy my time away from studies.

Hi. Feel free to tune out, because I know a lot of readers don’t live in LA. If you do, however, you probably already know that ANOTHER sales tax increase goes into effect today, July 1. We spoke here (somewhat jokingly since it was on April Fool’s Day) about the previous tax increases. A second hike hits today, with another half percent added on, making the total sales tax at least 9.75% in many areas.

Dang, that’s high. Way robbery.

Some cities, like Pico Rivera and South Gate, are now sitting at a whopping 10.75% sales tax. This all comes at an “interesting” time, when California politicians have (supposedly) been pulling all-nighters in order to fix the budget mess. The Governator and other legislators have been butting heads about proposed cuts. If they can’t find a way to fix the budget defecit, they’ll be forced to start issuing IOUs.

It’s kinda weird. I think a lot of Californians have become numb to the whole “sky is falling” gloom and doom predictions for the budget. They’ve been crying wolf like this forever, so I think this kind of news has lost its zing for a lot of people. But word is that this time its rather serious.

I think I’m going to move to Oregon.

I’ve been sort of following a rule here at Cheaplander - I haven’t made too many posts about “homemade” things unless I’ve actually tried it myself. However, I’ve come to realize that this just isn’t the most efficient way to blog. In fact, it’s downright stupid of me. For one thing, there’s tons of Cheaplander-ish things out there to try out, and only 24 hours in the day to try them out.

For another, I’m just a plain lazy writer.

So I’m going to start putting up stuff that I’d be interested in trying out in the future. Hopefully, someone out there will have tried it already and can steer me away or toward it.

The other day I was looking up how to make various cleaning products at home. I haven’t really tried any of the suggestions out there yet. The one I found that I was interested in (can’t remember where it came from) was making your own glass cleaner. The big daddy in product names for this is of course Windex.

I’d already taken the first step of buying the non-name brand varieties of glass cleaner. But I was wondering if the “recipes” for it really worked as well as the store-bought variety. Here is what I heard: All you really need is some kind of ammonia and alcohol. The one I saw used equal parts of rubbing alcohol, lemon ammonia and water. That was pretty much it.

OK, so I’d be interested to hear if anyone has every tried something like that. Also, I know there are a ton of other cleaning products out there that you can supposedly make at home - so I’d be interested in hearing about that as well. One of the other ones I’ve been meaning to try one of these days is homemade laundry detergent.

Review Roundup - Week of June 26, 2009

In a Review Roundup first, I’m listing only ONE review this week. Not that there weren’t other great ones out there this week. But I kinda feel like this one needs to stand alone. Whether it’s because it’s just a mind blowing review, or maybe because other review sites may not want to be associated with it, remains to be determined. It may also be because I’m lazy like hell today, and this makes for less typing and/or searching through my Thunderbird feeds for good reviews. I apologize to all the other product reviewers out there who un-benefited from this. Nevertheless:

The Impulsive Buy - Ideaworks Comfort Wipe

Editor’s Note: I loved the above reviews review, I wish I could write as well as these people this person, and I promise the next roundup will have more reviews as long as Marvo does not write about another brand of butt wiper.

I have to admit that the title of this post on CNN drew me in. But secondly, I just wanted to see if I could take a picture of a 100 dollar bill and photoshop it into the window of a houe. I failed in that attempt, but I might as well tell the story briefly.

The housing market has sunk so low in places that real estate is being offered for ridiculous prices. The subject of this article was a foreclosed piece of property that was $95 for the property and $5 for the house.

OK, so there are a few catches. You have to move to Detroit. You couldn’t pay me to move to the home of my mortal hockey enemies, where everything is upside-down (what is this with Canada to the south?). But even if that was cool with you, these are definitely fixer-uppers with an emphasis on the fixer-upper. Non-handypeople need not apply. The other catch is that the properties in question are in pretty run-down areas.

However, the word is that artists are being drawn to the area because of the crazy deals. I imagine that there might be some excitement about the cheap houses - if you could only see the junky “lofts” that are rented to artists and musicians for sky-high prices in downtown LA…

Actually, according to the article, the state is going to start PAYING people $25,000 to buy a home, as long they pay 1% of cost and actually live in it. I guess the cost to fix it up is so prohibitive and the areas are so run-down, that the state is willing to use part of the relief fund to get people into the houses.

I can’t think of anything else to say. New Homes For $100! Just remember to read the fine print. And bring your belt sander along.

Source: CNNnnnnnnn